As i run both Tie fighter and X-wing 1998 versions i get constant flickering of my desktop. the game runs great. I tried every compatibility setting and no luck. Any known way to fix this...its almost unplayable since it happens every 30 seconds.

It's something in your background. I have Chrome open for work (hehe) and when I have Outlook and in focus when launching the game, no issues. Chrome thought = seizure inducing flash!

I'm having the same trouble. The desktop will flicker through for a second or two and after 30 seconds or so it will happen again. Your explanation makes good sense though. I shut down just about everything I could find that might be trying to pull focus, but so far no luck. I'll hang around this post and see if there might be something else to try.

Tried alle the advice, did not solve the issue. Win8 here running. As well when trying to record the problem with Fraps I got a clean freezing picture without the problems. Turning google chrome completely off reduce the flickering to a playable state, but did not stop it from flickering.

And I have some strange pictures from the lol pbe page flickering into my game now. It is completely odd. I have no idea from where the game even pulls that graphic data, because it seems not to be from anything that is running.

I get severe flickering, making the game unplayable. It's liek my graphics card or monitor just cant cope with such low resolution.

I'm going to test with all versions but it's pretty disappointing.


Well, thats interesting. The 1994 version using DOS BOX doe snot flicker at all.

I get this on xwing and tiefighter, not the dos box versions though.

Having the same problem, tried to deactivate Virsuscan and everything else that might pull focus but it does not help.

Hi ! You might want to disable to set it to very long time for wallpaper auto changing timing... it solve my problem.

tks :)

Wallpaper auto-changer was my problem too. And some apps on taskbar

Thanks - this worked. It's a bit... drastic, but it worked.

If you (and anybody else dealing with the flickering on Windows 8) want a less awkward method you may try this:

Create a txt file in your Tie-Fighter folder (name it any way you like) and add these three lines:

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
call tie95.exe
start explorer.exe

Save the file and change its suffix from txt to bat. Executing this file will close explorer.exe, launch the game and automatically launch explorer.exe for you as soon as you quit the game. Saves you all the fiddling with the task manager, tabbing out of the game etc..

If the console window doesn't close automatically after explorer.exe has been restored you may want to add another line that says "exit".

To be honest I'm not a Windows 8 user, though, and cannot *guarantee* that this method works there but it really should (it certainly works up to Windows 7 - just tried it myself). Would be great if you could try it and confirm that it works.

Yeah, that's because DOSBox is newer and uses more modern graphics libraries than most early Windows games. It's the games running in DirectDraw (aka software mode) that cause all sorts of trouble these days when explorer.exe is running. That's why killing explorer.exe on both Windows 7 and 8 solves many such issues.

Btw, you shouldn't run into flickering either when you're already on a mission and have set the game to hardware mode on the options screen (since the game *should* be using Direct3D at that point instead of DirectDraw).

You may try the method with the batch file I just posted above if you want to achieve that less awkwardly. But as I said, haven't tested it on Windows 8 yet, only Windows 7.